French Fold Cover Setup Guide

Because a single sheet of paper is wrapped around the rest of your pages to create your cover, french fold covers should be created as a single spread.

French Fold Cover Template

1. The “Page Height” measurement in the guide below should be the same height as the inside pages of your book.
2. PERFECT BOUND PROJECTS: The “Page Width” measurement should be your interior page width x 2 + your selected french fold width x 2 + spine width.
   
   SADDLE STITCH PROJECTS: The “Page Width” measurement should be your interior page width x 2 + your selected french fold width x 2.
3. To calculate the width of your spine, see our online spine calculator.
4. Finally, as with your inside pages, you should include 0.125 inches of bleed around the edge of your design that will be trimmed off. Also make sure to keep all important text and graphics 0.125 inches away from the trim line since softcovers, like all offset printing, exhibit minute variance in their production.
   
   If you are using a design program that does not allow you to specify the bleed, as with Adobe Photoshop, you will need to add the bleed into your page calculations:
   
   PERFECT BOUND PROJECT
   Page Height = interior page height + .25”
   Page Width = interior page width x 2 + your selected french fold width x 2 + spine width + .25”.
   
   SADDLE STITCH PROJECT
   Page Height = interior page height + .25”
   Page Width = interior page width x 2 + your selected french fold width x 2 + .25”.

Important Design Considerations

Because the book block is glued into the cover, perfect bound books have 10 millimeters of area on their inside covers that will be glued to the first and last inside page. This means that all artwork on the inside covers, the first inside page, and the last inside page should be kept at least .40” away from the spine.

Additionally, we score the front and back cover to allow them to open without a rough crease.